Unlike search engines, chatgpt doesn’t cite references at all (last I tried) or even if it does it often makes up nonexistent references. And because it rephrases the content, there’s often no way to prove they got the material from a particular source, so harder to litigate plagiarism too.
How would contributing to the weights of this LLM help content creators?
On a second thought, I guess a lot of marketing content would also love to be crawled by anything that crawls…
But the book writer who wrote a detailed, expert book on how to deal with the software ("Photoshop for Dummies"?). OpenAI might be seen as a competitor.
A government would be easier to say all their data isn't allowed to be crawled, so they can sue later or just say no later on when they figure something classified was in there, or simply when they change their mind.
I believe the default response should be 'no, we'll look into it' for anyone, and then carefully let legal take a look at it (gonna be expensive). For the software vendor, too. Although their crown jewels are likely the source code to their product(s).
So that LLMs can learn from it? Profit is not the only thing that motivates people. I’ve spent years contributing to Stack Overflow to help people solve their problems, with the understanding that they had an open data policy and anybody could access the data dump easily to build things with it. It pisses me off that they are now trying to lock that information away where LLMs can’t access it. The whole reason to contribute is to help people. Locking that information away instead of exploiting this new channel to help people more effectively is antithetical to the reason I contributed in the first place.
With Stack Overflow, everybody contributed to their data set. This data set is centrally managed by Stack Overflow and access is whatever they choose to allow. When they block access to that data set, it effectively takes it away from the public.
With OpenAI, they aren’t locking anything away. They are analysing the data and adjusting the weights in their model. They haven’t stopped people from accessing the data they are training upon.
What Stack Overflow are doing is stopping the free flow of information. What OpenAI are doing is providing an additional channel for it to flow through.
This is particularly weird since the EU Datamining directive that got us into the mess inside the EU seems to suggest that robots.txt seems to be a valid means to retain copyright for data mining (there is no 'fair use' otherwise inside the EU). Are there other machine-readable standards? I further don't quite understand, how EU copyright relates to training a model outside the EU and using it within again (probably this is the biggest enforcement gap)
It's true that after you use the bot to fetch you the papers, you do still need to read them... but given what a dramatic difference there is between GPT3 and 4 I'd say this is a problem that will be utterly annihilated before most people even hear it exists.